Yay for the New York Times! Alex Berenson, doggedly keeping up on the Zyprexa story, has written an article about how state prosecutors in Vermont and Illinois are now demanding that Eli Lilly submits documents to them about their marketing practices of Zyprexa. Something I didn’t know:

“Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia have also recently accelerated their own investigation into Lilly’s marketing of Zyprexa.”

My residence in the Philly area has prompted me to follow this closely now. More juicy information:

“In a statement yesterday, Lilly said it would cooperate with the investigations and had done nothing wrong. ‘We intend to cooperate with the Illinois attorney general’s civil investigative demand relating to Zyprexa,’ the company said.

While the investigation being led by Illinois is civil, other investigations into Lilly’s conduct are both civil and criminal. [emphasis mine] Attorneys general in California and Florida may seek to recover Medicaid payments that the states made for Zyprexa. Any fine or cost recovery could be sizable, because Zyprexa has been a commercial success.”

Because investigators need to search through more than 10,000 documents relating to Zyprexa and its marketing and talk to former and current employees about the matter, it could take years for anything to happen. Berenson’s last paragraph at the end brought my excitement to a quick halt:

“As long as drug makers comply with federal requirements to provide data about their products to the Food and Drug Administration, companies have a relatively strong defense against criminal prosecution, according to lawyers who are experts in drug marketing.”

Great. So as long as Lilly complies with the FDA and state and federal prosecutors, they can escape criminal prosecution. Please don’t tell families who have loved ones who died over this medication. Lilly’s settlements are nice and all, but money is never restitution for someone’s death. I’ll soon have a post up about how Pfizer had this issue with Neurontin from 2002-2004. They, too, had to pay more than $430 million to settle lawsuits on civil and criminal charges. Pfizer plead guilty; let’s see if Eli Lilly follow suit (no pun intended).

I’ve been a little late on the bus with this, but I’ve previously written about Andre Waters who killed himself in November. Despite theories of depression surrounding his suicide, a neurologist has claimed that Waters sustained brain damage from playing football which triggered his depression and led to his death. Dr. Bennet Omalu, an expert in forensic pathology, says that Water’s brain tissue “had degenerated into that of an 85-year-old man with similar characteristics as those of early-stage Alzheimer’s victims.” Omalu gets pretty grim though:

“If [Waters] had lived, within 10 or 15 years ‘Andre Waters would have been fully incapacitated.'”

The NFL has no comment.

As I’ve been trying to tell my husband recently, pets can relieve symptoms of depression. Come on, who can be sad when you’ve got an happy little dog wagging its tail at you with bundles of love? (I’m thinking cute little Yorkies or friendly Golden Retrievers.) Owning a pet can have great mental health benefits:

Can reduce anxiety

Induce social contact

Promote a better quality of life

Help kids develop higher self-esteem and lower levels of fear

The only downside: animals can cause stress. But it seems like the stressors can be addressed, i.e. animal training, neutering. (source: The Trouble With Spikol)

Also linked to by Liz Spikol, another interesting mental illness combatant: sports therapy. It seems that it can help those suffering from PTSD, abuse, amnesia, and shyness. Italian doctors, however, a testing to see if soccer can treat illnesses like depression and schizophrenia. This should be interesting.

Oh, and NOTHING to do with mental illness, but I found this NYT article on weight loss and maintaining it quite interesting.